When Mercado Libre was born in 1999, in a garage in Buenos Aires, it had around 80 competitors with the same model. It survived because it did the opposite of almost everyone else: it saved its money while the rest burnt theirs on marketing.

That decision sums up what starting a business in Argentina still demands, in a country where crisis is part of the business plan. And Mercado Libre did not just apply it: it passed it on to a generation of founders and investors who now compete beyond the country’s borders.

Marcos Galperin founded the company with two Stanford classmates, Hernán Kazah and Stelleo Tolda. While most of their competitors were spending to go public as soon as possible, they held on to their money. When the dot-com bubble burst and the competition ran out of funds, Mercado Libre still had 40 million dollars in the bank, as Galperin recounted at Stanford.

Paradoxically, that cash almost cost them the company. "The shareholders wanted to close the company because we hadn’t spent the money yet," Galperin recalled in 2019. At that meeting he broke down: "I couldn’t convince them and I started crying inconsolably." In the end, the founders won the vote by a very narrow margin.

The second lesson came in 2001 and had to do with expanding abroad. eBay took a 20% stake without putting in a single dollar: in exchange, it handed over its Brazilian subsidiary and made them its partner for the whole of Latin America. Mercado Libre lost money for seven years, became profitable in 2006 and went public in 2007.

Those two lessons did not stay inside the company. In 2011, Kazah left Mercado Libre and founded the venture capital fund Kaszek alongside Nicolás Szekasy, who had been the company’s chief financial officer.

Hernán Corral followed a similar path: he spent 12 years at Mercado Pago, the group’s payments platform, before co-founding Pomelo, which provides payments infrastructure to fintechs across Latin America.

Galperin, for his part, sits on the board of Endeavor Argentina, an organisation that selects and supports high-impact entrepreneurs. Its then executive director, María Julia Bearzi, highlighted in 2021 what the Argentine environment instils in its founders: "the flexibility to adapt to the constant changes in the environment and the ability to react quickly enough to do so".

The new generation is already competing abroad with that mindset. At South Summit Madrid 2026, Córdoba-based Wise CX won the Enterprise Solutions category of the Startup Competition, and CryptoMate was one of the 100 finalists, chosen from more than 4,500 startups.

That generation is growing up in an environment that continues to put cash to the test. The first challenge is inflation. It has eased, but in August 2026 prices were still rising by 33.5% year on year, according to INDEC. That forces companies to review prices, salaries and cash forecasts far more often than in Europe.

The second is access to foreign currency. Individuals can now buy dollars without limit, but companies remain subject to currency controls, known as the cepo. For a startup, this makes it harder to pay overseas suppliers or to plan its funding.

The third is a small and shifting domestic market, which pushes many founders to sell abroad as early as possible. For those exporting services there is a clear incentive: the Knowledge Economy Law, passed in 2019, exempts them from export duties.

The law, which benefits software, biotechnology and professional services companies, among others, also includes a tax credit equivalent to 70% of the social security contributions the company pays for its employees and a reduction of up to 60% in Impuesto a las Ganancias, the Argentine equivalent of corporation tax.

Inflation, the cepo and a small market all push towards the same reflex Mercado Libre had 25 years ago: protect your cash and look abroad.

Mercado Libre’s story leaves three questions that every Argentine founder should be able to answer:

●      Cash: do you have enough runway to hold out if funding suddenly dries up, as happened to Mercado Libre’s competitors?

●      Market: can your product be sold outside Argentina from the first year?

●      Incentives: are you taking advantage of the Knowledge Economy Law, including the exemption for exporting services?

One of those stories will take to the stage on 21 October. South Summit and IE University are holding IE Venture Day Buenos Aires, the Argentine stop on the Scaleup Series, at the Usina del Arte, from 13:30.

In "From Argentina to the World", Juan José Güemes, of IE University, will talk to Hernán Corral about what it takes to build and grow a company: the challenges, the tough decisions and the convictions that have shaped his journey.

"Life after the Exit" will bring together Diego Sáez Gil, founder of Pachama and Bluesmart, business angel Santiago Pinto and Nahuel Celerier, Undersecretary for Productive Policies of the City of Buenos Aires. They will discuss why many founders, after selling their company, choose to start up again, invest and give back to the ecosystem. Kazah, in moving from Mercado Libre to Kaszek, followed a similar path.

The programme is rounded off with two sessions on the identity of the Buenos Aires ecosystem and the capital driving the region’s startups, and with two rounds of the Startup Competition. The winners will be announced at 17:10, ahead of the networking drinks. Book your place here.